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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Couple of weeks ago I purchased from eBay one of these amazingly cheap an useful modules with MAX7219 LED driver and 8 digit LED display. It is ideal for frequency counter project. The problem was the absence of library for PIC microcontrolers. Luckily, I found a great library for Arduino and I reworked it to be compatible with PIC. The schematic of the frequency counter is actually almost the same as the previous . It uses PIC16F628A microcontroller with external 32.768kHz watch crystal attached to Timer1 to generate 1 second time base. Measured signal is fed to pin3 (RA4) which is counted by Timer0.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

I published this schematic long ago in this article: Adjustable power supply and since then I made some improvements in PCB to make the board as small as possible. The idea is to be easy to attach the whole board to the heat sink which we want to monitor. The board is only 27mm x 27mm.